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But when I spoke to Bonanu in Vilnius last year, I asked him specifically about how his image might be read. That kiss was an expression of socialist brotherhood, not homosexuality. Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Hönecker kiss one another on the mouth – the original photo of the pair kissing in exactly the same fashion was snapped by Régis Bossu in 1979. Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons photograph: Joachim ThurnĪ more complicated context emerges when one recalls that Bonanu’s artwork in Lithuania is based on the famous 1990 mural by Russian artist Dmitri Vrubel on the Berlin wall, titled My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love. ‘Trump and Putin, like so many others, may fear being gay but every time you joke that they are, you reinforce the validity of that fear, not only to them, but to the rest of society,’ Hurley wrote.ĭmitri Vrubel, My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love, 1990. Recently, transgender writer Lee Hurley took to The Guardian to protest exactly this issue, with visual reference to a mural by Lithuanian graphic artists Mindaugas Bonanu and Dominykas Čečkauskas (which went viral in 2016), which features Trump and Putin locked in a kiss.
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The depiction of Trump and associates engaging in homosexual relationships has understandably roused the ire of several LGBTQ+ commentators, with the frequent outcry that ‘being gay isn't a punchline’.
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Unlike Saltz’s (admittedly more reprehensible) tweet, The New York Times video is still easy to find. In the episode, Trump’s ‘not-so-secret admiration for Vladimir Putin plays out in a teenager’s bedroom, where the fantasies of this forbidden romance come to life.’ Their tongues twist together as they ride on the back of unicorn Putin is stereotypically shirtless. The previous month, The New York Times published a satirical animation of pastel sketches, set to twee music and snippets of Trump speeches, titled ‘Trump and Putin: A Love Story’. Saltz later deleted the tweet and apologized ‘for sharing an image that many found offensive and homophobic.’ ‘Hey! What’s doing to King Turd,’ Saltz tweeted. In another, Hannity stands behind Trump, staring down with a tense grimace. In one, an advert for Fox News, host Sean Hannity kneels facing US president Donald Trump’s crotch (identifiable through his infamous red tie). In July, Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Jerry Saltz posted two images on Twitter, neither of which were explicitly profane, but both of which carried clear sexual undertones.